Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is currently under way, and as usual, the technical fellows at Microsoft gave speeches about the deep architecture of Windows - in this case, Windows 7 of course. As it turns out, quite some seriously impressive changes have been made to the very core of Windows - all without breaking a single application. Thanks to BetaNews for summarising this technical talk so well.

I don't understand this. Any memory that is not being used right now for programs can be used for caching. And if programs suddenly have a need for more memory, that memory can simply be freed. Instantly. No disk activity required. Why would you *want* to limit what the kernel does with otherwise unused memory, which can be put to good use?

In the Linux world, we do have a bit of a conflict between those folks who think that programs' seldom-used pages should get swapped out to make more room for disk cache, and those who feel that program's pages are sacred, and should not be swapped out unless absolutely necessary. But that is a different issue.